The Great Geek Manual

The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception. Since copyright protection is granted only with respect to original forms of expression, the vast majority of data, information and ideas produced worldwide at any given time belongs to the Public Domain. In addition to information that is not eligible for protection, the Public Domain is enlarged every year by works whose term of protection expires. The combined application of the requirements for protection and the limited duration of the copyright protection contribute to the wealth of the Public Domain so as to ensure access to our shared culture and knowledge.

Copycense recently raised an interesting question on Twitter, asking if, instead of trying to carefully define what qualifies as “fair use,” we might be better off trying to define what constitutes “unfair use.”

Unfortunately, people rarely think about copyright this way. Most people consider copyright to be the rule, and things like the public domain and fair use to be exceptions. With the rise of the information age, this is a problem. In an attempt to address the issue, some people over at Communia have assembled a wonderful Public Domain Manifesto to set down some general principals that establish the groundwork for reforming copyright.

Read more at the Public Domain Manifesto

1844
The Nomenclator of Leiden University Library is first published. It is the first printed catalog of an institutional library.

1844
Samuel F. B. Morse demonstrates a magnetic telegraph using his Morse Code to transmit the message, “What hath God wrought!” from the Old Supreme Court courthouse in Washington D.C. to his partner, Alfred Vail, at the Mount Clare Depot of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company in Baltimore, Maryland. Vail responds by retransmitting the same message back to Morse. Thus, Morse formally opens America’s first telegraph line, launching America’s telegraph industry. The biblical text, from Numbers 23:23, was selected by Annie Ellsworth, the teenage daughter of the U.S. Commissioner of Patents. Congress had appropriated US$30,000 in 1843 for a telegraph wire to be strung the eighty miles between Washington and Baltimore.

1913
An article in the journal Moving Picture World coins the term “natural history film,” a full year before the word “documentary” is first used to describe a film.
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The best way to predict the future is to design it.

- Buckminster Fuller

1576
In Denmark, Tycho Brahe is given Hveen Island on which to build the Uraniborg Observatory.

1825
William Sturgeon publishes the first article concerning electromagnets in the journal Transactions of the Society of Arts (Vol. XLIII, p.38). The publication features illustrations of his apparatus for electromagnetic experiments, including a horse-shoe shaped magnet and a straight bar magnet.

1903
Paris, France and Rome, Italy are connected by telephone for first time.

1905
Thomas Edison is issued a patent for a “Process of Duplicating Phonographic Records.” (US No. 790,351)
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Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Surfing through Tumblr this morning, I stumbled across a girl who uncovered this gem at the library where she works: Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It sounded so intriguing that I searched around and found this preview chapter. I’m not sure I want to spend thirty dollars on it, but I definitely need to get my hands on this book.

Product Description: The intense and continuing popularity of the long-running television show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1997-2003) has long been matched by the range and depth of the academic critical response. This volume, the first devoted to the show’s imaginative and widely varied use of music, sound and silence, helps to develop an increasingly important and inadequately covered area of research – the many roles of music in contemporary television. In addressing this significant gap, this book provides an exemplary overview of the functions of music and sound in the interpretation of a television show. This is done through analyses that focus on scoring and source music, the title theme, the music production process, the critically acclaimed musical episode (voted number 13 in Channel Four’s “One Hundred Greatest Musicals”), the symbolic and dramatic use of silence, and the popular reception of the show by its international fan base. In keeping with contemporary trends in the study of popular musics, a variety of critical approaches are taken from musicology, cultural studies, and media and communication studies, specifically employing critique, musical analysis, industry studies and hermeneutics.

Also see: Full contents list and Index.

1906
The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, are granted a U.S. patent for their “new and useful improvements in Flying Machines.” (US No. 821,393) It is the first airplane patent in the U.S.

1925
Tokyo Broadcasting Station becomes the first Japanese radio broadcaster. Later in the year it will move to Atagoyama, where it will begin regular transmission.

1930
An audience at Proctor’s Theatre in Schenectady becomes the first to see closed-circuit television projected onto a big screen.
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In the near future, the web is going to be the master copy of human knowledge. We need to figure out ways to use that knowledge.

- Håkon Wium Lie, Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software
chief technology officer of Opera Software, in an interview with GigaOM, May 21, 2010.